Choosing Zola
So, I've got a lot of experience as a React developer. When I decided to try making some a personal site, I naturally assumed I'd be using it. It didn't take me long to change my mind on that.
The thing is, I know a lot about React, but the purpose of this site is to learn new things. So in the interest of getting out of my comfort zone, I started looking at static site generators (SSGs), and specifically ones that did not use React.
Jekyll was a quickly brought to my attention. It looked like a great place to start, but installing the Ruby packages needed to run it was just enough of a frustration to set me looking around for some alternatives. Luckily, there are plenty.
I chose Zola because it looked like it had the features I needed to get started, and it is written in Rust, which is something I'm very interested in learning. If I have to learn some Rust in the future to support this site, that's great!